Sunday, October 7, 2012

J.C. Leyendecker :: Liz Novaski

I first found out about J.C.
Leyendecker when I was in high school and one of our magazine subscriptions
came with a free calendar with illustrations from old “Saturday Evening Post”
covers. Most of them were by Norman Rockwell, but many came from J.C. Leyendecker,
a prolific illustrator from the early 1900’s who actually mentored Rockwell and
many other famous American artists.

Born in Germany, but raised in
Chicago with his sister and two brothers, Joe had an interest in commercial art
from an early age, designing his first label at the age of eleven and pursuing
an internship at an engraving firm at fifteen. His first formal education came
from the Art Institute of Chicago, but Joe saved his money to fund an education
for his brother, Frank, and him to attend Academie Julian in Paris so that they
could experience the graphic art culture that was much more prevalent in Europe
at the time. He was influenced by the Impressionists, as well as Alphonse Mucha
and Toulouse-Lautrec and was greatly interested in the power of a piece of
commercial illustrative art to be viewed and appreciated by thousands of people
across the world regardless of its original function as an advertisement or
magazine cover.

After Paris, Joe moved to New York
with Frank and his sister to further the success he had already achieved as a
student in Europe. Frank and Joe worked together at first, but Frank was a much
less disciplined that Joe, to the point where Joe was doing most of the work
for Frank’s commissions. Their work became massively popular through the 20’s
and 30’s, but by World War II, his work was no longer in demand as interests
turned to film and photography rather than the illustrative work. He lived
until 1951 in isolation with his model and partner, Charles Beach.

His best known works are probably
his “Saturday Evening Post” covers which included his iconic New Year’s Baby
and holiday illustrations, as well as his illustrations for Arrow Collar
Shirts, for whom he invented the Arrow Collar Man, an icon of masculinity and
style. In fact, Leyendecker most enjoyed drawing and painting men. His
insistence of the destruction of all of his personal correspondences and
materials upon his death and his long-time association with Charles Beach
confirm to modern art historians that Joe was almost certainly closeted and his
relationship with Charles was romantic. However, at the time of their
publication, his work was considered to exemplify the height of heterosexual
masculinity in its portrayal of athletes, society men, and working men.

What I most admire about
Leyendecker’s work is his strong sense of graphic elements incorporated with
lively and lifelike figures. He worked almost exclusively from live models, and
loved to capture the idiosyncrasies of human anatomy, movement, and expression.
As a result, I find his figures to be incredibly animated and imbued with a
sense of existence and personality. The tiny but important details he put into
his illustrations allow a viewer to more powerfully relate to the image, which
is an important aspect of both commercial and noncommercial work.

His process is also very
interesting in that he preferred to create a batch of thumbnails first, and
then work directly from a model based off of his ideas for the final
composition. He would work from thumbnail, to sketch, to smaller full color and
detail canvas, to final image through use of pencil grids drawn over his
canvases to maintain sizes and relationships of elements. He would also discard
and add aspects to his illustration throughout the process, to create the most distilled
and effective version of the image in the final. His brush technique, known as pochet, is one of my favorite things in
that despite the fact that his work is done almost exclusively in oils or gouache,
the hatching strokes emulate textured pencil marks.

All in all, Leyendecker is one of
my favorite artists, specifically because of his fascination with the power of
art as a commercial commodity as well as his ability to turn his masterful
technique towards the production of images that stand as artworks beyond their
primary function as advertisement.